Water use, productivity and interactions among desert plants. Final report
Productivity, stability, and competitive interactions among ecosystem components within aridlands are key processes related directly to water in deserts. This project assumes that integrated aspects of plant metabolism provide insight into the structure and function of plant communities and ecosystems. While it is difficult to extrapolate from instantaneous physiological observations to higher scales, such as whole plant performance or to the interactions between plants as components of ecosystems, several key aspects of plant metabolism are scalable. Analyses of stable isotopic composition in plant tissues at natural abundance levels provide a useful tool that can provide insight into the consequences of physiological processes over temporal and spatial scales. Some plant processes continuously fractionate among light and heavy stable isotopic forms of an element; over time this results in integrated measures of plant metabolism. For example, carbon isotope fractionation during photosynthesis results in leaf carbon isotopic composition that is a measure of the set-point for photosynthetic metabolism and of water-use efficiency. Thus it provides information on the temporal scaling of a key physiological process.
- Research Organization:
- Utah Univ., Salt Lake City, UT (United States). Dept. of Biology
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE, Washington, DC (United States)
- DOE Contract Number:
- FG02-90ER61087
- OSTI ID:
- 10122872
- Report Number(s):
- DOE/ER/61087-1; ON: DE93007012
- Resource Relation:
- Other Information: PBD: 17 Nov 1992
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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Water use, productivity and interactions among desert plants
Water use, productivity and interactions among desert plants